In a society as deeply divided as our own, it is fanciful to think that we will be able to deliberate our way to a consensus. To resolve the longstanding puzzle of the administrative state’s democratic legitimacy, we need to resist the neoliberal impulse to erase politics and, instead, design opportunities for genuine contestation.
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A look at the power-building strategies adopted by the Black Panthers, the Gray Panthers, and the Young Lords. Plus, a CFP for LPE scholars, a podcast you won’t want to miss, and the scourge of price-gouging.
![A pinback button for the People's Church / Iglesia De La Gente. The background of the button is light blue. At center there is a yellow cross with white accent behind it. A black chain is on either side of the cross. Black text around the top reads [People's Church]. black text around the bottom reads [Iglesias De La Gente]. The back of the button has a metal pin with a clasp.](/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/NMAAHC-2013_68_147_001-1-450x452.jpeg)
Creative and strategic militancies interrupt the normal functioning of society, shift the terms of debate in public discourse, and expand the definition of the common good. Never has this been more evident than when the Young Lords barricaded themselves inside The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem.
By inviting their members to learn bureaucracies and hold them accountable, the Gray Panthers empowered elderly people to see themselves as experts capable of disentangling convoluted bureaucracies and reshaping them to better address local needs.
By organizing and running free health centers, the Black Panthers not only delivered much needed social provisions. They also empowered participants to envision and pragmatically move toward new political horizons.
An interview with Kim Kelly about her new book, a deep dive into the Emergency Price Control Act of the 1942, and some recommended readings for newcomers to the blog.
Between 1942 and January 1946, national output more than doubled, unemployment dipped below 2 percent, and real civilian consumption increased by 50 percent. Yet thanks to an across-the-board price freeze, prices rose merely 3.3 percent per year. What lessons can we draw from the initial failures and ultimate success of this stabilization program?
The LPE Blog chats with labor journalist Kim Kelly about her recently published book, Fight Like Hell.
Kate Jackson on the democratic virtues of administrative agencies, Luke Norris on a progressive vision of civil procedure, and the Sustainable and Global Economic Law research project invites you to summer in Amsterdam!
Civil procedure is the infrastructure of democracy, allowing the public to interpret, elaborate, and entrench constitutional-regulatory commitments over time. Rather than sidelining courts entirely, a revival of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition should include a progressive vision of procedure.
“It is not true that the U.S. Constitution has little to say about our economic rights and liberties – let alone our material welfare. Instead, as Fishkin and Forbath argue convincingly, the Constitution has nourished a democracy-of-opportunity tradition that places our equal social rights front-and-center in constitutional practice and politics.”
Joseph Fishkin and Willy Forbath kick off a symposium on their new book, Aziz Rana probes the persistent historical link between domestic equality and US imperial power, and Luke Herrine reflects on price-gouging and the theory of the fair price.
If one spends too much time around mainstream economists, one might be inclined to think the whole idea of a state enforcing norms of fair price is either redundant or perverse. But we know better than that.
The historical high-tides for the domestic experience of democracy-of-opportunity have occurred during periods of territorial and global expansionism. A serious effort to recover this tradition entails engaging with its imperial dimensions.
In the introduction to a symposium on their new book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath make the case for reviving interest among progressives in constitutional political economy.
The possibilities and limits of gig worker coordination under existing law, a legal regime where horizontal coordination is embraced as a social good, and the the misidentification of shareholding with investment. Plus, an LPE student group for the restless and hopeful and the hot new issue of SAQ.